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Franz
08-25-2008, 11:21 AM
THE CLUSTERFUCK NATION CHRONICLE

James Howard Kunstler

August 25, 2008
The Abyss Stares Back

As the political conventions descend like the soggy forces of nature they have become—the tropical depressions of politics—the Republican party will be seen, with growing clarity, as the party that wrecked America. So many shoes are about to drop, and so many dominoes lined up to fall 'out there' on the financial landscape that the thump and clatter of crashing institutions will sound like the percussion section of the renowned USC marching band as the nation tramps toward the general election.

In a classic calm-before-the-storm moment, last week's momentous Jackson Hole monetary conference played out like Sherlock Holmes's "dog that didn't bark in the night." The poobahs of global banking turned out in the Grand Tetons to compare Gulfstream jets and show off their concho belts, and that was about it. For all the massive turmoil in the banking system, almost no real news leaked out of the conference, and one was inclined to come to the unsettling conclusion that nothing came out because absolutely nothing happened there—because absolutely nothing can be done about the gathering calamity of capital.

At the moment, two of the biggest elephants in the room, so to speak, are going tits-up with X's where their eyes used to be. These would be the "affordable housing" enablers Fannie and Freddie, who managed during the past decade to make housing virtually unaffordable for any normal, responsible person unwilling to game the system—with the additional consequence that not only the housing market but the general credit-and-lending apparatus of the US has entered a state of morbid failure. These two corporations are now dead, incurring a legacy of obligation that will add five trillion dollars to the national debt at one stroke. Nobody knows what the exact results of this debacle may be—and the current silence about it is deafening—but odds are the effect will range somewhere between destroying the currency and bankrupting the United States altogether.

Meanwhile, the list of giant banks on life support runs to at least ten, with an unknown number of less giant banks that will be squashed when the big ones go down. The sound you hear in the background—even beyond the sound of John McCain's carping, snotty campaign commercials—is the whoosh of capital leaving the system. By capital I mean assumed accumulated wealth ready to be put-to-work by this society. We won't have any. The president-elect will wake up November 5th as leader of a poor nation, and all the grand plans laid out during the campaign will have to take a back seat to a severe revision of hopes and expectations.

Now the Democratic party has assembled in Denver to anoint its candidate. The big question for me is whether this will occur in a dignified manner, or whether Hillary Clinton's supporters will turn this into yet another fiasco-du-jour. Forgive me as I begin to wonder what's up. Mr. Obama has graciously yielded to the Florida and Michigan delegations that their morally-compromised primary votes be allowed to count. And Obama has yielded to the ceremony of placing Mrs. Clinton's name in nomination. And a flock of disgruntled harpies has landed in Denver to advance Mrs. Clinton's claims at all costs -- and, well, I fear that there may be some room for mischief here, like an arrant hijacking of the convention by the forces of Hillary.

This would be an almost unbelievable debacle, and yet we are in a season of debacles so anything can happen, really. I am generally allergic to paranoia, but Hillary's recent going-through-the-motions lip service to the Obama campaign does not convince me that she is truly on-board. Rather, I think she is egotistical enough—in the Greek tragedy sense—to just kick back now in her Denver hotel suite and see whether her troops can seize the arithmetic of the convention and jam her down the party's throat. I know this sounds like a paranoid fantasy, and I offer it up as little more than that, but, there you have it, like so much brisket on the butcher block....

Meanwhile, reports coming out of Denver that Hillary's Harpies say they would rather vote for John McCain than Barack Obama simply boggle the mind. How fucking crazy are these women? And what have they made of their movement to advance political equality—a mere campaign of revenge? Is that what their country needs right now?

Speaking of John McCain, my friends, we can return to the general theme of this essay, which is that his party will come to be regarded as the party that wrecked America, and therefore, despite the poll numbers zinging around the news-o-sphere lately, he really doesn't have snowball's chance in hell of winning this election—assuming it will go ahead—as a contest between himself and Obama. Returning also to the theme of impotence among the leaders in the finance sector—Mr. Bernanke, Mr. Paulson, et al, as displayed in Jackson Hole—I'm rather convinced that the carnage on the money scene will be so extreme this fall that the nation will seem to have been transformed from a superpower to a basketcase before November 4th, and that the blame for this state of affairs will be blindingly obvious: the people in charge for the past eight years looted the treasury, destroyed the currency, and left the machinery of capital a smoking wreckage.

And so, with the fucking nonsense of the Beijing Olympics being over, let the real games begin.

MY COMMENTS ON KUNSTLER’S ARTICLE: He’s got it right, in my view, about the likely outcome of the national elections in November: the GOP, by then increasingly seen as the party that wrecked the U.S. economy and drove the train right off the tracks, and its pre-Alzheimer’s candidate McCain are both going to go off the electoral tracks with the smoking wreck it has made of this country financially. The president-elect after November 5th (presumably Sen. Obama?) and his/her ‘handlers’ and the Democrats won’t have a clue about what to do in response to the crumbling economic ruin they inherit from the criminal GOP—and they won’t because the Democratic Party has forgotten, right along with the by-then-departed GOP, that modern capitalism was objectively based on asset management, not debt management—which increasingly and predictably became the new basis of the Modernist-managed “new economic model” followed in the USA, Europe, and elsewhere worldwide beginning around 1948-1950. Indeed, Modernist Predator Capitalists and their political stooges (both of the “Right” and the “Left”) have greedily cooked the golden American goose and eaten it right down to the last morsel. And, as always, in the real world acts have consequences.

09-08-2008, 05:33 AM
So what do we switch to? Socialism with a politburo riding high while the rest of us enjoy equal distribution of misery? An Islamic Theocracy with guys squashing women's human rights and telling us who we can and cannot have as significant others? Could Hussein Apollo Obama usher in a new order for the ages? I'd like to read about a new deal. :?

Franz
09-08-2008, 01:07 PM
In the early spring of 1945, Winston Churchill led the British Tory Party against the British Labor Party in wartime general elections, and 'Winnie' memorably described and encapsulated the economic program platform of Labor as "Strength Through Misery." Churchill and the Tories were badly defeated at the polls, as we all know, and the triumphant Laborites proceeded to joyfully "nationalize" much of British heavy industry and create an early version of the Modernist Welfare State, which of course fundamentally still stands (other than the middling reforms that Margaret Thatcher managed to ram through Parliament during her glory days in the 1980s).

Churchill's charactrization of the Labor program as one of "Strength Through Misery" was essentially accurate, to be sure. However, one must also note that 'Winnie-as-Warlord' had already set Great Britain up for worldwide imperial defeat and military eclipse (by the triumphant USA and Soviet Russia) by the closing days of WW II. The triumphant Marxist Labor Party simply in effect moved to liquidate what little was left of British private industry and Predator Capitalist private exploitation of British natural resources--all in the spurious name of egalitarianism, to be sure.

The point I make here is that Great Britain, a.k.a. The British Empire, was reduced to a relative third-rate, backwater power in direct result of the machinations and depredations inflicted on the British people, first by the bloody lust for war of the British imperialists, mainly Tories, in 1914 and again in 1939, in result of which the once-fabled wealth of the British Empire was squandered on non-productive waging of foreign wars, and, second, ensuring after the conclusion of WW II, the victory of their lust for total political power of the Marxist British Labor Party Modernist politicians. Each of those two constellations of Modernist politicians serially "won," but British's former status as a world power was crushed by the Modernist politicians' (first by the Modenrist Right, then followed by the Modernist Left) gleeful liquidation of Great Britain's accumulated fund of capital, the killing-through-war of millions of Britain's young and not-so-young men, and the resulting reduction of once-great British wealth and power, leaving Britain broke, militarily insignificant, and morally shattered.

This overall pattern of self-liquidation and self-defeat by the corrupt Modernist political elites of Britain between 1898-1948 is being closely paralleled by the equally corrupt Modernist political elites of the U.S. (1948 to the present). The fiction of British "greatness" after 1948 was maintained solely by the indulgence of the British Modernist establishment (both of the Right and Left) by the triumphant Anglophile American Modernist elites. Thatcher managed a small recovery, for a time, but of course Blair and now Brown and the "new" Labor Party have been in the process of liquidating that Thatcherite recovery and cooking what little is left of the British goose.

The Republican Party, falling completely under the domination and control of the Neocons and the rampant avarice of the American Modernist Predator Financial Capitalist cabal in 2000-2001, has pulled off the awesome "accomplishment" of wrecking the once-productive American economy while militarily reducing the U.S. to a purely regional power by means of endless, bloated, mindless taxing and expenditure of the American middle- and working-class hard-won incomes for the sole benefit of the Military-Industrial Complex. At this late stage the nuclear weaponry of the U.S. remains its only unscathed military resource, and as any relatively alert observer should have noted by now, the Neocons and Busheviks are just itching to use U.S. nuclear weapons on, variously, Iran, Syria, and now Russia. Can China as a WMD target be far behind?

Your principal error, Tink, lies in your thinking that you and the mass of American voters have a real choice to make that will make any difference whatever in deciding who will decide the outcome of the Modernist political 'Great Game" that is being played out. It won't. As has been the case for literally decades, the Modernists will be the victors, no matter which political party ticket--McCain-Palin or Obama-Biden--wins the coming national election. For the Modernists, it is a head-we-win/tails-you-lose set-up. And, indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, the American people are going to be the losers no matter which Modernist political constellation triumphs in November, wheter the Republicans or the Democrats. Did you ever visit the gambling palaces of Las Vegas, Tink? If you have, surely you understand that the games are played by what are called the "House rules." In sum, the House always wins. Get it? If it comforts you to believe that "The People rule," then be my guest. But "the people" don't and have never "ruled," and they never will.

And it is this central reality that James Howard Kunstler understands nad writes of in his commentaries. At this time millions of American women and American men--who should know better--are waxing lyrically over "Babe Palin." But this, too, shall pass. The white-hot, consuming heat of Modernist reality is hot enough to melt anything--except the growing military might of Russia and China. Don't think so? Don't agree? Okay, stick around and see. Winnie Churchill hated like hell that 'Great Britain' was going to lose imperial control of India, but even he had to swallow and accept that in due course. He did.